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Which GPL-like licence for object oriented? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello, I work on Pharo, an open source derivative of Smalltalk. Pharo is licensed under MIT hence most of my work needs to be licensed also under MIT.

However, time to time I have some projects in my free time that I made for my personal usage or for friends, and in those cases I am not OK with my work being used by for-profit project not giving anything back. I would very much prefer to use GPLv3 on those cases, but my understanding of licensing is very poor and I have been told there is a "virus" behavior on GPLv3 that may prevent people to use at all what I do, and that's not my intention.

Do you have any advice how to handle this?

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[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

this is the "virus" thing explained (by chatgpt, heh, but this is exactly what I heard) : Inheritance and Derivative Works: In object-oriented programming, inheritance allows you to create new classes based on existing classes, inheriting their attributes and behaviors. When using GPL-licensed code, whether GPLv3 or LGPLv3, any derived classes or subclasses created within your project will be considered derivative works. As a result, if you choose to distribute or publicly release these derivative works, they must comply with the licensing terms of the original GPL-licensed code.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's not really a good explanation. The concept of a "derivative work" in copyright law is unrelated to object-oriented technology, and the GPL is mainly applied to non-OO code anyway.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Yeah I did make the right assumption then. I feel virus has a negative connotation though